Related articles

Sure enough, it is home to a towering ape, Kong, but also a range of prehistoric-style beasts including a colossal buffalo (friendly) giant stick insects (not friendly) and the dinosaur-like Skullcrawlers (deadly).

After a promising opening 20 minutes, as the team are gathered from the seedy bars of Saigon and Da Nang at the tail end of the Vietnam War, the film degenerates into generic, plot-free, monster mayhem that was all too clearly crafted on computers.

With the early introduction of the monsters, suspense evaporates.

The pity is that the period setting is full of potential, a time when America was haunted by self-doubt and its efforts to tame the jungles of South-East Asia had failed humiliatingly.

Might Skull Island offer some redemption, or merely further evidence of man’s heart of darkness, Joseph Conradstyle? Apocalypse Now is heavily referenced, alongside other ’Nam movies.

Samuel L Jackson is an angry Vietnam veteran determined to prove the might of America’s military.

WARNER BROS

Kong: Skull Island is set largely on a mysterious, uninhabited, Pacific island in 1974

Amazing new stills of Kong: Skull Island

Thu, March 2, 2017

Brand new stills just released from director Jordan Vogt-Roberts' blockbuster King Kong update starring Tom Hiddlestone and Brie Larson

Brie Larson is a war photographer (or “anti-war photographer” as she puts it) and our own Tom Hiddleston is in buff shape as the party’s guide, an ex-British Special Forces chap.

Unfortunately, there are too many characters with no clear hero and they all seem to be acting in their own separate movie.

Hiddleston is terribly grave (there could be a Bafta in this) while John C Reilly plays the whole thing for laughs as a US pilot who has been stranded on the island since the Second World War (and thank heavens for that because he’s the most entertaining thing about the film).